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Rewired

Fiber optics have finally arrived in my neighborhood! One frigid day, workmen from FiOS, the Verizon service renowned for providing home Internet service at the speed of light, showed up with ear protectors and jackhammers. Then, as workmen have done regularly for more than a century in Brooklyn, they tore up the road. Like miners in reverse, they laid down pure telecommunications ore, threading strands of silver-black fiber-optic cable under Hicks Street, a lopsided, part-cobblestone thoroughfare down which chugged the Hicks Street Line, a railroad that ran at the turn of the 20th century.

Now the FiOS trucks are gone; the road is sealed up. Hicks Street, which is still lined with carriage houses, looks Victorian again. But somewhere under the ground — in the snarled archaeology of cables, lines, tunnels, tubes, co-ax, copper and pipes — there are now pliable, beautiful, clear fused-silica tubes guiding light waves from communications centers right to our houses. FiOS is available to more than 15 million homes in the United States. Another fiber-optic service, AT&T U-verse, is available to about 26 million residences. These services are known generally as fiber-to-the-X because they bring fiber optics directly to the home, the node, the basement; someone got tired of all the FTT acronyms and made it all FTTx. Consumer Reports has repeatedly rated these services as preferable to nonfiber services.

Inside my apartment building, then, there are now many more cables, installed by nail-gun men, also from FiOS, who mounted ladders in the stairwell and told me they were putting up molding. It’s not molding. The building’s common spaces are now defined by braids of insulated wire, thinly disguised by flimsy vinyl strips. The strip over my apartment door came loose the day it was nailed in. Laid bare is a tangle of ropy cable that looks much meatier than I expected from the light-fantastic phrase “fiber optic.”

Staring at the exposed cables, I had a gnawing sense that our media-critic forefathers of the 1960s would dislike them and the way they slither up to our front doors from some central-information regime. But maybe not. Maybe they would see FiOS as a new way for regular people to have efficient access to the all-important open Internet. You can never tell what ’60s people would have thought of the digital world, had they foreseen it. So I asked my neighbors — in person and on Brooklyn message boards — what they think of FiOS. They’re excited. Many of them are ready to quit Time Warner Cable, an imperfect provider that some of them believe is tyrannical. It is commonly held that Time Warner Cable and other telecom companies will never be truly speedy because they continue to use old copper pathways unsuited to Internet signals.

FiOS is the first company to use fiber optics for “the last mile,” as the final stretch of connectivity between communications provider and customer is called (though it’s almost never an actual mile). Some 3.9 million people across the United States use FiOS now for Internet service; about 3.3 million use the TV service, many of whom purchase it in a bundle with their Internet and phone service.

Photo

Credit
Olimpia Zagnoli

Two or three days after FiOS finished work on my block, the Federal Communications Commission proposed a set of incendiary new rules about the distribution of the Internet. These rules, while they would restrain telecom companies from gross oligopoly, would enable them to block, at their discretion, apps and services for wireless Internet users. The companies would also be able to charge fees for smooth-flowing broadband over fixed lines, which might strand people who don’t pay in “slow lanes” on the Internet. (The phrase alone triggers road rage.)

The F.C.C.’s critics say that the rules violate the ideal of net neutrality — equal access to the Web. Some have even suggested the new rules open the door to First Amendment violations. As Senator Al Franken of Minnesota put it, “If corporations are allowed to prioritize content on the Internet, or they are allowed to block applications you access on your iPhone, there is nothing to prevent those same corporations from censoring political speech.”

America’s wires are not just a metaphor. Protected pathways, from roads to optical fiber, have been integral to the nation’s political development. Our technological world evolves every day, incrementally — and then, suddenly, in lurches. Is this one of those times? It’s hard to grasp each shift’s ideological implications; things are moving too fast. Whether the fiber optics newly at our front doors mean more government surveillance, more democratic access, more corporate power, more entrepreneurial innovation or more inhibitions on speech — we can’t know yet. To me, the strands of filament now buried in Brooklyn seem to represent the culmination, for now, of the historic changeover from industrial America and its railroads to digital America and its fiber optics. That alone seems momentous.

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MORE FIBERCheck out FiOS yourself, at Verizon.com. The site’s coyness about where FiOS is available and how far its reach is might drive you crazy. But evangelically satisfied FiOS customers will tell you that, after you sign upfor FiOS, you’ll never need customer service again. Worth investigating.

THE EXTENDER“The next medium, whatever it is —it may bethe extension of consciousness.” This is Marshall McLuhan in 1962. His work is still stunning. Don’t miss Douglas Coupland’s new biography, “Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!”

WORKS ON PAPERThe Brooklyn Daily Eagle — for which Walt Whitman, among others, wrote — was published from 1841 to 1955, and then revived from 1960 to 1963. You can consult The Eagle now at Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online.

A version of this article appears in print on January 2, 2011, on Page MM12 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Rewired. Today's Paper|Subscribe